As a child I remember having competition with my elder brother as to who would eat more rava dosas. I just love rava dosas and relive those days each time I make rava dosa for breakfast.

This time my hubby topped it up with making a heart shaped dosa for me making this dish even more special.

Rawa Dosa is very simple to make and with a simple spicy coconut chutney, can transport you to seventh heaven.

Preparation Time : 10 minutesCooking time : 5 minutes or less

Ingredient (Serves 4) :

Rawa - 1/2 cup

Maida - 1/2 cup

Rice flour - 1/2 cup

1 medium onion chopped

jeera/cumin seeds - 2 tbsp

black pepper corns - 1 tbsp

cashew bits or halves - 3-4 tbsp

Coriander leaves - chopped optional

Oil - 1 tbsp

Salt to taste

Water

How I made it:

Mix the rawa, maida and rice flour with sufficient water such that the water is about 1 inch above the solids. Don't worry you don't need to get this right at first go. You will see as you read through.

Leave that aside for an hour or so. The solids would settle at the bottom. Ensure now that the water level is at least 1 inch above that of the solids. This adjusts the thickness of the dosa. More water makes it a paper thin roast.

Add the chopped onions, green chillies, chopped coriander, pepper corns. If the cashew bits are roasted, add them as is, else add them in the next step.

Heat oil in a takda pan

Put the jeera and cashew bits.

Once the jeera is crachling and cashew bits are light brown, add to the dosa batter mix.

Adjust the salt.

Now, heat a flat pan or tawa.

Pour a ladleful of the dosa mix and swirl it around on the pan, taking care not to let it drop off the sides of the pan/tawa.

Cook on high heat till it starts to brown.

Flip it over and cook for about 30 seconds.

Serve hot.

Make sure you serve these with a spicy chutney.

Tips :

If the dosas are sticky, could be that the maida is more so reduce the maida and replace the reduced quantity with rice flour.

So what do you do when both you and your better half wake up at 3am? Well, it is gonna be a nice and sunny day so we decided to go for a trek at Shakespeare Regional Park. The gates open at 7am so since I a little time on my hands, I decided to make these quickie parathas to take with us as trek grub.

Preparation time : 10-15 minutesCooking time : 4-5 minutes for each paratha

Ingredients (makes 6 parathas) :

1 cup whole wheat flour

1/3 cup chopped onion

1/2 cup grated carrots

1 tbsp jeera/cumin seeds

1 tbsp kasuri methi

1/2 tsp red chilli powder

1 green chilly finely chopped

3 tbsp oil

Salt to taste

Water to knead the dough

How I made it:

In a pan, heat up 3 tbsp oil.

Put in the jeera seeds.

Once they crackle, put in the kasuri methi

When the methi begins to get brown, don't let it burn, throw in the onions and green chillies.

Fry till onions start to become soft.

Throw in the carrots, red chilli powder and salt.

Remember to add a little more salt as the wheat flour will also be added. So when tasted, this mix should taste a little salty - not too salty.

When the carrots are turning soft, turn off heat and wait for the mix to cool.

When cool, add the flour to the mix and knead into a soft dough.

Separate the dough into 6 balls of uniform size.

Roll out each ball into a circle and for each circle repeat steps 13 onwards.

Heat a flat pan/tawa.

Place the circle. Cook for 30-40 seconds.

Lower heat to medium and turn the parata.

Add a few drops of oil to help the parata cook and remain soft.

After a minute or so, if there are enough brown spots on the paratha, turn the paratha and make the heat back to high.

Add a little more oil and cook till there are enough brown spots on both sides. Take off heat.

Serve hot with raita or pickle or pack and carry on a trek. Can be eaten as is.

All packed and set to go.

Here's a pic of the beautiful place - a must visit. Do check out my review of the place which is coming up on the blog soon.

So a friend of ours is down sick with a cold and bad throat. We were headed towards his house to visit the #RBTGP and therefore decided to drop in on him and give him some rasam. For dinner, we added the pepper chicken to have a classic South Indian Combo : Rasam and Pepper Chicken served with rice. I once again remembered Sushila, albeit she used to serve Rasam with Mutton Chops.

I've come to realize that I use the terms heavenly food, comfort food for the stuff that is similar to what I have eaten as a kid. No matter how the day, a good bowl of comfort food, and all seems okay. May be it reminds one of the good ol' days. This is one of those meals.

For the rasam :Cooking time : 15 minutesPreparation time : 5 minutes

Ingredients (Serves 4) :

Tomato - 1 large quartered

Garlic - 2 pods crushed

Tamarind paste - 1 tsp

Water - 2 cups

Pepper powder - 1 tbsp

Jeera/Cumin powder - 1tsp

Oil/Ghee(preferred) - 1 tbsp

Mustard seeds - 1 tsp

Jeera/Cumin seeds - 1 tsp

Curry leaves - 1 sprig

Salt to taste

How I made it:

In a pressure cooker, heat up one cup of water.

Add the tomato quartered. Cook on high till one whistle and turn of heat.

While the pressure releases from the cooker, heat 1 tbsp ghee in another pan.

Add the mustard seeds and wait till they stop spluttering.

Add the jeera, crushed garlic and curry leaves.

When the garlic starts to brown at the edges, add the tamarind paste mixed with 1 cup of water.

Mash the tomato in the water that it was boiled in and add it to the pan.

Add the pepper powder, jeera powder and adjust the salt.

Turn off heat once it comes to a boil.

Garnish with coriander leaves and serve hot with rice or drink as a soup.

For the pepper chicken :Cooking time : 30 minutesPreparation time : 10 minutes

Ingredients (Serves 4) :

Chicken - 500g

Small/Pickling onion - 4

Red onion - 1 small

Garlic - 8 cloves

Ginger - 2 inch piece

Oil - 2 tbsp

Pepper powder - 4 tbsp

Salt to taste

Red chilli powder - 1 tsp

Coriander powder - 1 tsp

Cumin powder - 1/2 tsp

Turmeric powder - 1/2 tsp

Water - 3/4 cup

Curry leaves - 1 sprig

How I made it :

Wash and marinate the chicken in salt, turmeric powder and 2 tbsp pepper.

Grind the small onions, ginger, garlic, red chilli powder, coriander powder, cumin powder and 2 tbsp pepper powder to a paste with as little water as possible.

It's six months since I set foot in the land of the breathtakingly beautiful New Zealand. Time flies but the rollercoaster ride never ends. Well, things are mellowing down now but the initial settling phase was not as smooth as I had expected it to be. "Ignorance is bliss" is not something I used before but we all do learn and our eyes do eventually open up. No wonder we all look back at those times when we were most ignorant as the "best of times". Confused beings that we are, always wanting the good times but trying hard as ever to get ahead. Ha ha ha!

Six months and we move from my birthday to the birth of my nephew, exactly on Diwali. I smile when I think of the silence back at home on this otherwise unusually noisy day at my house. The hustle and bustle to decide who would go to distribute the sweets and if you had got all the people on the list of people to whom sweets need to be distributed, the packing of the sweets, the visits to the temple, the Lakshmi puja, the Saraswati puja, the Ganesha puja and the best drive around the town to get a glimpse of all the firecrackers for free. (wink)

Now, Diwali is known as the festival of lights but has many reasons for its significance. One is the return of the beloved Lord Ram from exile for which the lamps are lit and the night sky lit up with crackers to provide sufficient light for the returning lord, on a moon starved night. (Psst...Diwali usually falls on a new moon day). Another is to mark the end of another harvest season which brings us to the reason for this post.

It is believed that as a sign of success and prosperity one must eat 7 vegetables on this joyful day and as this blog of mine focusses on recipes amongst other things, I made Sindhi Sai Bhaji with Bhuga Chawara. I ensured that I added as many veggies to the Sai Bhaji as possible. Fortunately for me, I got the quintessential ladies finger here in Auckland. Darn this place, you get a quarter of the veggies you get in India and even if you do get some, you have to buy them frozen. Grrr!!! (Ignorance is bliss until you move to a country only to realize what you have gotten yourself into.) Last year I had made Pav Bhaji with as many veggies.

The course on haute cuisine that I have enroled in had the recipe of nestle tollhouse chocolate chip cookies and explains why you must stick to the recipe and try to exact the measurements specified. So, I decided to give it a try. The first time I made it with the exact directions and it turned out exactly like the cookies that I used to have at the Hilton in Roseville, California. I did feel really guilty eating those as they had loads of butter and sugar in them. I was happy that I had made a small batch of 15 cookies.

I was having two people, whom I am very fond of, visiting us this evening and so decided to make these cookies but decided to give them a little healthy twist. The result was different but good as well.

Prepare the baking tray. I covered a cooling tray with aluminium foil and spread some flour over it.

Sift together the flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt.

Beat the sugars, vanilla essence and butter for 2 minutes on high.

Add the egg and beat well till the mixture is creamy. I beat mine a bit too much such that the mix got quite thick. This gives it a more crumbly texture.

Add the mix from step 3 and mix till well combined.

Shape into cookies, press in some nuts and chocolate chips. Now, if you had not beaten the egg stiff, you may have a moist dough. In that case, use a spoon to place spoonfuls on the baking tray and press in some chocolate chips and nuts.

There are a zillion different reasons that you will hear from Pras when asked why he chose to move to NZ and ONE out of all of those is "to eat as much lamb and beef as I can as this country is known for it". Well, how can I deny him his meat then?

So I had some ladies finger leftover from the diwali sai bhaji cooking and decided to use that up along with the lamb pieces that I had bought from the supermarket. Perfect mix of veggies along with meat proteins.

Note : As I type out the draft for this one, the heavenly aromas of the curry fill the air and we just can't wait to dig in. We are waiting for the pressure to release.

We ate this yummy dish with bread but it would go well with poori, rotis, parathas and rice as well.

Preparation time : 10 minutesCooking time : 45 minutes

Ingredients (serves 2):

Large Onions - 2

Mutton/Lamb - 500g

Ginger - 2inch piece

Garlic - 6 cloves medium sized

Red chilli powder - 3 tsp

Coriander powder - 1 tsp

Garam masala powder - 1/2 tsp

Turmeric powder - 1/2 tsp

Black pepper powder - 1/2 tsp

Coriander leaves - 2 sprigs with stem

Mint leaves - from 1 sprig

Medium sized Tomatoes - 3-4

Ladies finger - 10-12

Thick coconut milk - 1/4 cup

Salt to taste

Water - 1 cup

Oil - 1/4 cup

How I made it :

Finely chop the onions.

Grind the ginger, garlic, dry powders, coriander and mint leaves together with as little water as possible.

Wash and chop the ladies finger into 1 inch pieces. Fry them in a pan with a tsp of oil.

In a pressure cooker, heat the oil

Add the onions and fry till light golden brown.

Add the mutton and fry till it turns colour and becomes lighter.

Add the paste from step 2 and fry for about 5 minutes.

Add tomatoes and fry till they are soft and easily blend in.

Add about a cup of water, adjust the salt and give 4-5 whistles on high.

How can one not try the seafood options available when living on an island? And we've been eating only red meat as NZ is well known for its red meat. I went shopping on my own this weekend and hence decided to pick up some prawns. I did wanna pick up some clams as well but put that away for the next time.

I made this curry in a hurry and with readymade coconut cream. It was delicious nonetheless and a match made in heaven when had with kerala appams. I used the double horse brand ready mix for easy palappams.

Also, please do excuse the lazy me as I continue to take the pics either after we've eaten our fair share for the day and with my humble phone camera.